THE ENGLISH GARDENS
Long hair,
is
that
against the law?
and:
America, brush your teeth!
209
At the same time, such fear produced a petulance praised as
anger in his poems. During the crisis of the passport he began
confusing his fear with his creative activity and crying,
"If
they'd
just let me write poems !" The outer fringes of his audiences
imagined he meant The Muses or The Cruelties of Poverty.
The inner circle understood well enough, but they were
amazed when he explained to them the elaborate means he'd
devised for securing a passport: "I got this cousin, looks like me,
who'll apply.... Say, any you guys know if that ink really runs?
Well, my cousin'll apply, oh, maybe over in Jersey-that'd
throw 'em off the track- and . . ." To protests of why all that
trouble and why didn't Nicolas just go down and inquire, he
turned such a startled agonized face, covering it with his hands
and shouting through them, "You don't
get
it!" that looks were
exchanged and days of long discussion followed. There were tele–
phone calls to law students, dimly known; runners returned
carrying "the word," speeches were made, and it was even
day-dreamed that Nicolas stood every chance of being the new
Paul Robeson. This suggestion was reluctantly dropped when
Nicolas, defiant and snarling, warned them, "One word about
this to the papers" (a new phrase in Beatnik circles) "and you
guys'll see the
end
of Manas, get it?"
At last, on the day a pre-war Venezuelan freighter was to
sail,
Nicolas, muffled to his ears in a great scarf, more
than
usually unshaven, crowded into a taxi with several glum friends
and drove off to Brooklyn. One or two of them still had hopes
a reporter might have got wind of it, but other things held the
attention of the Press- Russia's ultimatum on Berlin, for ex–
ample. So Nicolas's boarding and departure were like those of :
millions before him-long, cold, with feeble waves and spastic
smiles from the rail. He headed down the harbor and off to sea.
Several days had passed since Nicolas's arrival in Venice.
